poshrule_uk wrote:Work are being fine with me for the record it's more my mind and having never been in this situation before.
We cannot help others if we do not help ourselves.
If we fail to help ourselves and thus fail to help others to the best of our capacity, we do them a disservice and we also generate failures later down the line.
Being a hunter/gatherer type animal, human beings are geared towards immediate results/outcomes rather than long term results;- we can call this striving versus farming outcomes. If you are striving then you are always trying to reach your peak but never quite getting there because you don't have a long term strategy and this wears you out. It's counter-intuitive to the way we are built but also the culture of work we have created which focuses on constant results, all the time. Longer term planning tends to be left to people higher up the chain who just use employees as expendable resources to do the grunt work. If you are instead farming, then you're doing the work you need to do - such as helping your body recover and taking care of your health - so that you can continue harvesting and producing in the longer term. Unfortunately in most work cultures, you need to take this approach on yourself, which goes directly against the way you are wired or have been cultivated yourself, and that means advocating for your own health in a way that some shitty employers don't understand. But you do have legal protections for that sort of thing.
The reason you feel this way is because you are used to delivering short term results, repeatedly. Which can eventually lead to health problems, or it creates an expectation for the same pattern of delivery both in yourself, and from other's perspective (in terms of their expectations of you).
When instead we need to stop and cultivate something (like health) in order that we can keep producing, this can leave us feeling like we're not doing enough or we are inadequate. That's because the actions and responsibilities you have now are different to what you are used to and don't have the same results NOW, but they have a benefit in the future.
Another way of framing it is like this. Say for example you have a lot of bills to pay. Instead of increasing your income or managing your debt by selling off assets or reducing spending, you take out a high interest loan to pay off the debt and decide you will figure out the interest some other time. Over 5 to 10 years the interest becomes many times more than what you had originally borrowed. You enter this cycle of paying bills with borrowing that then creates debt, you have to work hard to service the debt over and over again and this continues on and on forever.
This is an example of a short term solution for an immediate result.
Alternatively you can manage the debt responsibly, increase income, sell off assets or reduce spending. It is much harder at the start, and it will seem like a lot of work to make these changes permanently, but it will save you money in the longer term and it ends the spiral of borrowing and then paying off debt and then borrowing again, when you werestill living paycheck to paycheck and had no control over your finances. Instead you are now actually be richer and have less stress over your finances. That is because of the work that needed to be done over the longer term to solve the problem.
So when you have two scenarios like this, the clanger is that the level of pain and stress you experience is about the same. The amount of work you have to do, the energy you have to expend, is about the same. The only difference is when that happens.
So while you may be uneasy about taking some time off work, which doesn't have to be unproductive time (you could work on your skills or training or take up a new hobby, practice meditation or yoga or find something else to enrich your life), by following the advice of your doctor you can return to work refreshed and having recovered fully from your condition. This is a farming process for a long term outcome, because it takes time and investment to change your approach and your process to achieve a long term outcome. If you go out on a limb and show up to work half able or not 100% recovered, you will get the immediate result (the striving outcome) of feeling loyal, dedicated and committed to your work initially, but then you will probably have to take more time off work in the future or you could become ill or worse off than you were the first time in the longer term.
The outcome is different but the energy expended and the total amount of energy available is the same. It's just entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics). It is expressed in different ways.
Due to the way most people are wired we look for the short term outcome and we want to be fit, happy and healthy NOW so we can fulfil the commitments we believe we have (even if we don't have them). It takes a big mindset shift to pay attention at least some of the time, or the better you get at this, most of the time, l the long term outcomes that can enrich your life, and - here's the thing - enable you to do the best job you can in the longer term.
You might experience a paradox of change where people are surprised that you aren't that guy that goes gallivanting into work despite the fact they are sick. They might say, "this isn't you, you're tougher than this!", indeed you may well tell yourself that. But that's largely because of the expectations you yourself have set by almost never taking any time off work and never being away for long periods of time (which is just a matter of perspective anyway - 30 days or 4 weeks is not a long period of time).
What truly matters is your performance in the longer term and your value to the organisation/company. If you focus on the value you have rather than the way you express that value, and want to keep delivering those results, you have to pay attention to your health and those moments/opportunities that you need for your body (and your mind) to recover so that you can do that.
It's very conflicting for a lot of people who are loyal and committed to their profession, and I also think there are some work culture issues. Anyway I hope this helps because it applies to so many things in life. Just ask, are you looking for immediate short term results or are you looking at the bigger picture. What will this situation look like in 3 months, 12 months, 3 years. The vast majority of the time people are looking for outcomes (they are outcome oriented) but aren't focusing on the process.
The process of your body healing doesn't have immediate results because this naturally takes time and there is nothing you (or anybody else) can do about that. If you ignore that then there is a negative entropy over the longer term where your body breaks down and stress causes further illness.
So the right thing to do is to take your doctors instruction so that you can return to your job without building up a subsequent debt of health problems. For employers that aren't aware of that fallacy, in my opinion they can go to hell, and there are some terrible employers out there, but you should look out for themself. You can have this conversation along the terms, of, say, "I need to take the advice of my doctor and remain off work for X days so that I can return to work in my full capacity. If I were to return now I would feel like I wasn't performing at my best, could create avoidable problems that a fit and well colleague could address fully in the meantime, and I could also potentially exacerbate X condition/problem and set my condition back further. I'll do x things to focus on my recovery in the meantime and I look forward to returning to work at full strength."